Erik Ranheim: Profile: Dr. Erik Ranheim

I’m Eric Ranheim; I’ve been an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 5 years. I’m married and have 4 kids, 2 dogs, 2 cats, and the longest lived guinea pig on the planet. I grew up in Minneapolis, and went to undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania-Philadelphia where I played hockey and majored in Psychology, minored in English and Chemistry. I entered a combined MD & PhD program at the University Minnesota where I did most of my graduate work, actually at the University of California-San Diego with Dr. Tom Kipps, who’s an expert in small lymphocytcal lymphoma. Following getting my MD & PhD in immunology I went to Stanford University where I did my residency training in pathology, with a specialty fellowship in Hematopatholgy which is a sub specialty involving bone marrow, blood, lymph nodes, essentially leukemia and lymphoma. Then did a post doctoral fellowship in Dr. Irving Weisman’s lab at Stanford, looking at immune responses to cancer and also the stem cell biology of cancer. I moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003, where I work as a part-time clinician, part-time teacher and part-time researcher. I think of all cancer research lymphoma is of particular interest to me, and that’s in part because I have a PhD in Immunology. Lymphoma is basically the malignant counterpart of our normal immune system, in particular the normal lymphocytes which we call T-cells and B-cells. I studied the normal interactions between those two cells during normal immune responses, but also how lymphoma cells essentially use the same signals, the same proteins that normal cells do, and in fact they are if you like, trying to be normal lymphocytes. Because we know so much about normal immune system signaling, and interactions, it gives us a real head start as far as trying to interfere in lymphoma to either generate an immune response against the lymphoma cells or to interrupt the key signaling pathways they need to stay alive and so eliminate the cancerous cells. We’ve developed a really excellent website in collaboration with our partners and that’s at www.forwardlymphoma.org.